If you are coming from the PC universe, the Raspberry Pi boot sequence is funky

The boards do not include NAND or NOR storage – everything is on the SD card, which has a FAT32 partition with GPU firmware and a kernel image, and an EXT2 partition with the rootfs.
We’re not currently using a bootloader – we actually boot via the GPU, which contains a proprietary RISC core (wacky architecture). The GPU mounts the SD card, loads GPU firmware and brings up display/video/3d, loads a kernel image, resets the SD card host and starts the ARM.

I was hopelessly confused as to why I needed a kernel image and a system disk image until I read this. It is no goofier than the PC BIOS but is just different.